Snow Angels

27

I brush the snow off my shoes and leave them in the foyer, then walk into the living room. Kate is sitting up in the bed reading, wearing only black panties. Modern Finnish homes are so well insulated that no matter how cold it is outside, you can always hang around the house in your underwear in comfort. She holds up her book, Finnish for Foreigners. “Mita kuuluu?” she asks.

I kneel down on the floor beside her. Her skin is white, as colorless as snow. The veins under her skin cast bluish shadows on its surface. I touch her breast, trace the azure map with my index finger. “Rakastele kanssani,” I say.

“I tried to ask how you are,” she says.

“And I said make love to me.”

She giggles. “How do we do it with my cast in the way?”

I start peeling off my clothes. “We’ll figure it out.”

We figure it out. After the third time, I lay my head in her arm-pit and nuzzle her breast.

“If this was a scene in a romance novel,” Kate says, “they’d write that you were furious with desire.”

My mouth is full of her breast, I have to turn my head to answer. “I’ve been around so much ugliness lately, I needed something beautiful.”

She kisses my lips. “Mina rakastan sinua,” I love you, she says. Her accent makes her sound like a child learning to speak. It makes me grin.

“I’ve been thinking about the conversation we had,” I say. “What if, instead of going to live in the States, we moved to Helsinki? It has a big international community, a lot of people speak English there. You might not feel so isolated.”

“Would they let you transfer back there?”

“I think so.”

“Would you be happy there?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t know if you would be happy there either. We might be. But the big ski resorts are in the north. You’d have to manage another kind of business. It’s just an idea.”

She frowns. “I think you were right before,” she says. “Let’s figure it out after you solve Sufia Elmi’s murder.”

“The case should be closed soon.”

I tell Kate about everything that’s happened since I left the house earlier today. About how Pirkko murdered Urpo, about the chaos at the murder scene, Tiina attacking Raila. How I had to tell Valtteri and Maria their son was a killer and that I realized Heikki may have had a homosexual love affair with Seppo. About talking to Heli.

“That’s a nightmare of a day,” she says.

“Yeah. The good part is that if Seppo admits to an affair with Heikki, I can close the investigation. The Lone Gunman theory.”

“Why do you think Heli wanted to talk to you?”

“All that talk about making amends was bullshit. She tried to pump me for information about the case. She’s scared of something.”

“Do you really think she and Heikki might have murdered Sufia together?”

“I believe she knows more than she’s telling. I wanted to see her reaction when she realized she could be a suspect. The woman I knew had emotional problems but didn’t fit into a sociopath-murderer profile. But that was a long time ago. I don’t know her anymore. Her confusion about spelling ‘glass’ and ‘grass,’ and the glass and grass in Sufia’s and Elizabeth Short’s vaginas, if it’s a coincidence, is just plain weird. When you think about it, this whole case is just plain fucking weird.”

For me, a criminal investigation is like playing a card game. When I get more to work with as the game progresses, my imagination rearranges the cards. Discussing the case with Kate makes the whole deck reshuffle.

“I just got this mental picture,” I say, “of Seppo, Sufia and Heikki in a bedroom. Seppo fantasizes that he’s the Sheik of Araby, Sufia is his Nubian dancing girl, Heikki his teenage catamite. That would explain how Heikki knew about Sufia’s genital mutilation. He saw her vagina, maybe even had sex with her, while having a menage a trois with her and Seppo.”

“But how did Heikki make the connection between Sufia and the Black Dahlia case?” Kate asks.

“I don’t know that yet. Maybe Seppo can tell me. Maybe that’s why Heli tried to pump me for information, to see how much I know about Heikki’s relationship with Sufia and Seppo. Maybe she blackmailed Seppo into marrying her by threatening to tell me the truth. Who knows, she could have read about the Black Dahlia murder and talked about it with Heikki.”

“Maybe,” Kate says, “but given that Peter Eklund and Seppo know each other from Helsinki, Sufia’s relationship with Peter seems more than coincidental, like too much of a loose end. If you’re right and there was some kind of sex circle, is it possible that traces of his semen could be found in her mouth alongside Seppo’s, without his playing some part in all this?”

The deck reshuffles again. “Peter admitted to having met Seppo a few times in nightclubs in Helsinki. Maybe they discovered they have a mutual thing for teenage boys. It could be that Sufia wasn’t cheating on Seppo with Peter. Seppo could have introduced Sufia to Peter, more or less pimped her out to him. Seppo and Peter could have been fucking Sufia and Heikki together. Maybe it didn’t go exactly like that, but some variation on the theme.”

Kate takes it all in. “Then who killed Sufia?”

The deck won’t reshuffle for me this time. I can’t imagine the sequence of events that led to her death. “I don’t know, maybe they all did.”

My cell phone rings. It’s Antti, he’s on call tonight. I pick up. “Fuck Kari,” he says, “you have to come here quick.”

“Where?”

“The lake where you and your dad like to fish. Somebody’s dead, burned to death on the ice, looks like a child. I can’t fucking believe it.”

I can’t believe it either. The clock reads twelve fifteen A.M. The investigation of Sufia’s murder just entered its sixth day. Three murders during that time period. I hear Antti choke back a sob. He’s tough, it must be bad. “It’s still burning,” he says.

“Get a fire blanket out of the cruiser and put it out. I’ll call Esko and be there soon.”

Naked beside me, Kate waits for me to tell her what’s wrong.

“Antti says a child’s been burned and murdered. I’ll be gone all night.”

She winces. “No,” she says.

My feelings exactly.